More lines in the sky

There is something else going on in that sky. Another set of lines run in such a way as to establish perspective or recession. They also point towards my house and tree grouping which helps take the viewer to that area which is my subject. The first line I showed you was done for designs sake, these lines are part of my drawing, ( design is that part of a painting which is neither drawing or color) These lines are a little hard to see in the image here and not much easier to see in the real painting.The image above is the same without my explanatory lines so that you may compare the two. Oh doo da day!

As I said , I have kept the sky pretty soft. These lines are meant to be subtle. If I nailed them they would attract too much attention to themselves. An awful lot of good painting is about subtlety, the ability to subordinate things to the larger whole.

Above is a close up of a section of the sky, and below is the same close up with some explanatory lines drawn on it.You will have to look closely at these two images to see what I mean, but if you compare them you will see a smaller set of implied lines, these are sort of notches cut by negative space ( the sky color ) that do the same thing as the first set I described above.

Big bugs have little bugs ,
upon their backs to bite 'em
little bugs have littler bugs.
and so on, ad infinitum.
- Johnathan Swift

There are smaller lines implied by the negative spaces here too. They are one size smaller and "ride" on the backs of the larger perspecting lines shown above. So I have implied perspective lines on two different scales hidden in this sky. There are actually more of these than I have outlined.

Paintings often contain a lot of hidden geometry, in my case it is poolroom geometry rather than actual mathematical plotting. But there are artists who have worked with carefully plotted systems of geometric structures operating within their images. Arthur Wesley Dow was one and he wrote a book on what he called the Scotch Plaid system. He promulgated a formal way of plotting points on which elements of a composition were to be placed.

I hope I haven't confused you, this is rather ethereal stuff, I will return to it again and perhaps make it more clear. Some of these ideas are larger than a single post and I will have to spell them out in future posts. If I have you scratching your head, hang in there I will return to these ideas again. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow I shall discuss variety of shape.